Rajiv Menoncan recollect a few yarns right from the age of four. Like, doing homework, listening to his mother reciting a sublime keerthana. Music, he learnt from his mother Kalyani Menon (popular Tamil and Malayalam playback singer). She would explain the ragas—Devagandhari and Shankarbaranam. A lot of these hung around in his head.
Being the son of a Naval officer, he recalls shuttling between the North and South of India. And nowhere did he see a television set while growing up. He just remembers watching a few war films—The Guns of Navarone for instance. Then at Vizag, he was familiarised with late 70s Hindi cinema—Yaadon Ki Baraath. The cinema he saw in his formative years made a huge impression on the young mind—one of them was MT Vasudevan Nair’s Malayalam film Nirmalayam, Hindi films of Shyam Benegal and Guru Dutt’s Shaib Biwi aur Gulam and Ramu Kariat’s Chemmen “You got a sense of wow.”
It was after joining the Madras Film Institute that he got introduced to Bengali films of Satyajith Ray and Mrinal Sen. In Ray, he found an incredible master, who could write, shoot, draw and sketch. But it wasn’t until he saw the films of Bharati Raja, J Mahendran, and Balu Mahendra that cinematography trickled into his view. That was also when Ilayaraja’s music was getting popular. “All of them were breakthrough artists—be it the way they were shot or how the colour was coming through. They pulled me to see Tamil cinema.”
This was the age when he was getting exposed to a lot of things. After his father died, he was sure he didn’t want to be part of any rat race. It was a photo journalist (Desikan from The Hindu) who stayed on the first floor of his rented home who handed him a spare camera. He went around clicking two rolls of black and white. “And with that, I decided I could be a cinematographer.”
As he waited for the Madras film institute interview, with a few passport size black and white photos in his pocket, Rajiv felt he was being foolish. “Everyone had come with blow ups of wildlife, landscapes and portraits and I knew I stood no chance.”
When they asked him to show his photographs, Rajiv said he didn’t have anything to show. When they chided him, he shot back— “How can you be so sure these photos aren’t clicked by their fathers?” He was still hurt and angry for having lost his dad so early in his life. The board members were stumped for some time. But they were intrigued enough to start a conversation with him—from Pablo Picasso to Spanish civil war to photography. And he answered them all. After all, he was a Bournvita quiz winner.
At the film institute, there weren’t many classes, but they got exposed to cinema by Hariharan and Jnanashekaran. Since they didn’t have much opportunities to watch many films, they decided to form the Chennai film society.
